Heterogeneity plays an important role in the proper and abnormal functioning of many biological systems from neural computation to tumor development. Methods of probing heterogeneity in cellular expression have been limited by technical challenges (i.e. sorting and separating individual cells, isolation of sufficient quantity and quality RNA from individual cells, etc).
A method for rapidly profiling the transcriptomes of multiple cells, while retaining identities of individual cells would be a major advance and is needed.